The ability to determine whether a recipient of a mail piece actually opened the mail piece would be useful in many contexts. For instance, marketing mailers, i.e., entities that send large volumes of mail for purposes of marketing products and/or services, would likely find it very useful to know for a group of recipients that were sent a particular mail piece, how many those recipients simply discarded the mail piece unopened and how many of those recipients actually opened the mail piece and considered the contents thereof. The openability of a mail piece, i.e., the likelihood that it will actually be opened, is very important to such mailers and is a key factor in determining how mail pieces used for marketing purposes are designed. Currently, the effectiveness of a particular mail piece design in terms of its openability is measured only by the response rate to the mail piece. Response rate is not a very good gauge of openability as many recipients may have actually opened the mail piece, considered the contents, and simply chosen not to respond. Thus, the ability to capture more accurate information relating to openability can be used to more accurately evaluate the effectiveness of a mail piece that was used in a mailing or to test market a variety of mail piece designs prior to a mailing (and prior to investing the sums required for the mailing) to determine which have the highest openability. In addition, information relating to which particular recipients actually opened a mail piece of a certain design can also be useful to mailers such as marketing mailers to assist them in updating and refining their mailing lists to better target mail pieces to those recipients who are likely to have an interest in the mail piece. Recipients that routinely discard mail pieces unopened can be removed from the list, thereby saving the mailer on the cost of mail piece preparation and postage.
In addition, for some types of mail it would be useful for the mailer to know that the recipient opened the mail piece for legal reasons. For example, if a remittance was not received on time and the payer claims to have not received a notice of payment due and therefore protests late charges and the like, it would be beneficial for the mailer/payee to be able to have confirmed information that the recipient not only received the notice of payment due, but actually opened the mail piece and reviewed the contents. In addition, there is also value in the mailer having evidence that a specific mail piece was received by the intended receiver, even if the mail piece is never opened.
Radio frequency identification, or RFID, is a general term used to describe technologies that use radio waves to automatically identify individual objects. Typically, a serial number or the like that uniquely identifies an object (and possibly other information relating to the object) is stored on a microchip that is attached to an antenna. The microchip and antenna together are commonly referred to as RFID transponders or RFID tags. The antenna enables the microchip to transmit the stored information to an RFID reader. An RFID reader is a device that includes an antenna, a processor, a memory component and a power source, and is used to collect and compile information from RFID tags. An RFID reader converts radio waves it receives from one or more RFID tags into a form that can be stored in memory, and then be communicated to one or more computers for subsequent use thereby.
There are generally two types of RFID tags, active tags and passive tags. Active RFID tags have a battery, which provides the power required to run the microchip's circuitry and to broadcast a signal to an RFID reader. Passive RFID tags do not have a battery. Instead, they draw power from the RFID reader, which periodically transmits electromagnetic waves that induce a current in the passive RFID tag's antenna. The RFID tag's microchip modulates the waves and transmits or reflects a signal back to the RFID reader which in turn converts the signal into useful digital data. Active and passive RFID tags can be read as long as they are within the range of an RFID reader. RFID tags and RFID readers are commercially available from several well known sources such as Tagsys located in Fort Washington, Pa. and ActiveWave, Inc. located in Boca Raton Fla.